


If

by Beabaseball (beabaseball)



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Anxiety, Food, Gen, Memory Loss, Memory Related, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 03:06:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14034816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beabaseball/pseuds/Beabaseball
Summary: There are some memories that aren’t erased.He’d rather keep those and have never gotten some of the others back at all.





	If

There are many types of memory, Link has learned. He only has one that he trusts, really, and that is the memory in his limbs. The muscles which already know how to swing a tree branch as a sword, or how to fly after a spear’s thrust, and where to place his feet to stand strong and parry despite how his small and frightened mind tells him to flee when he sees a club coming down towards his head. Sometimes, he doesn’t even need to see the club before he raises up his shield and smacks it away.

This is the memory of cooking, too, he believes. This is the memory that rises when he guts a fish and feels the cold slick of its guts, and knows how to wiggle his fingers in to pull out the spine. He knows how hard to tug. He doesn’t know if he’s heard the sound of it before, but he knows the squish of the durian when he’s on the verge of overripe and the heft of cutting into meat too thick with gristle.

There is something about the smell of rain which soothes him too, and the river mud, and hot milk. He does not know why, but his body remembers these things.

These are the memories he is pleased to have. The crunch of a little yellow apple when he breaks skin and the pleasant burn in his arms when he’s lifted something heavy without over extending himself. The scuttling feet of lightning bugs trapped in his palm before he releases it out again into the night, a few feet higher up than it’d been before.

He does not like the way his stomach drops down with a heavy weighted dread as soon as his hands touch the master sword in Korok forest.

_You’re our only hope._

His arms burn with the weight of something that far, far overextends him, and he hasn’t even tried to budge the thing. They shake with an exhaustion he doesn’t remember and his shoulders strain with old wounds. His face tightens and his jaw clenches, but he doesn’t open his lips at all, so no one can see the tension.

_You’re our only hope._

His breath is hitching, and in the end, more than the sword, Link thinks that’s what woke him. The sound of weakness.

Maybe that’s why the Deku Tree begins to lecture him about how long he’s kept them waiting. How Hyrule’s hero has finally returned, and how he is so weakened, and how the sword might reject him and test him and he will die.

Link doesn’t say anything during the encounter.

The Deku Tree doesn’t seem to notice, even though Link feels his silence burning like a brand of unwillingness, a beacon in the night that should alert the country that they’ve made a mistake.

( _You’re our **only** hope_ )

He doesn’t try to budge the sword.

He runs into the hollow base of the Deku Tree, as if the dead parts of the past will hide him from the present for a moment longer, and he curls up on the only bed that’s been freely offered to him his entire life.

He hugs the Korok tightly, and hopes that’s thanks enough. He can’t do more than mumble to say it aloud.

These are the memories he wishes he could live without. The ones in his head. The ones about a girl he has long decided to save—since her dead father appeared before him, pleading for her life and safety.

He wasn’t going to say no to that.

So why do they all keep trying to convince him?

He stumbles upon places he accidentally glanced at in the compendium, shuffling up a hill by Lake Hylia and freezing because he remembers the view, and a little blond girl hiding in the shelter of the trees, curled by the ancestor statues, asking him if he’d have gone against his chosen path if he knew he wasn’t meant to be a warrior.

...he doesn’t know what the person in the memory would’ve said. If he ever said anything. He doesn’t know about that past life where he stood as tall as he could to try and lift the weight a little higher on his shoulders, as if posture and formality could mean anything when he remembers the guts falling out of his abdomen and blood splattering his face, but still standing, wet breaths in the rain, knowing his real life stood behind him and he did not belong to himself.

...he doesn’t know what that person would have said.

He doesn’t know if he ever said anything at all.

He thinks, if the girl asked him now, he would say that with how these memories dog him, that there is no running from fate.

He curls in the leafy Korok bed and can’t sleep more than a few hours, thinking of that girl in the dark castle in the distance, and a pleading voice that calls out his name when the moon turns full.

He would not ignore it.

He’d like to save it, if he could.

But he thinks he understands the princess a bit, now, even if the person from the past never did at all.

It was hard to live up to the history of people you’d never been.

(He wonders, when they meet the princess, if maybe they could be friends.)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi I’m in Bolivia writing video game fanfic again, as is tradition at this point I guess


End file.
